Friday Fictioneers – Grandfather Paradox

~ Neil MacDonald
PHOTO PROMPT © Lisa Fox

Triumphantly, he straddled the boundary, one foot crunched into the snow, the other warming in hot sand.

They’d told him it was impossible: you had to wait for summer to come, they said—you couldn’t go to it. With mocking earnestness, he had explained that, of course, you could. All it took was a plane ticket. He’d known what they meant. And now he’d proved that, as Einstein taught, time is only another place.

Hopping across the frontier, he narrowly avoided being cannoned into by a boy chasing a volleyball. The lad looked familiar, just like Grandad in childhood photos.

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The grandfather paradox is a well-known refutation of the possibility of time travel. If you travel back in time and accidentally kill your grandfather, then you can never have been born to travel back in time. Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

44 thoughts on “Friday Fictioneers – Grandfather Paradox”

  7. We recently re-watched Back to the Future with the kids and I was reminded of the grandfather paradox in relation to Marty splitting his parents up. Of course, the movies just deal with such things carelessly, but your character better be carrying a photo of himself just in case!

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  9. Great story, Neil. I get a satisfying sense of the personality of your MC plus a little glimpse into the mysteries of time travel. And a close call with potential disaster when ‘Grandpa’ scoots by at the end.

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